Recruitment is now a level playing field…for some.

There was an article doing the rounds on LinkedIn yesterday that showcased four examples of businesses with top talent brands…. a fancy way of saying they did recruitment well. And looking at the companies involved you would have expected them to be good at it. I mean, if Google, cannot attract talent then something is seriously wrong in their recruitment department!

On the surface of it, Google’s story, similar to most other massive global brands, is not very relevant to us in recruitment agency land. None of us have the resources and money they have to spend, and none of us are as big or sexy – although some recruiters seem to think they are the sexiest thing since suspenders, Barry White and an early night!!! But, we can all take something from what they, and similar companies are doing. Because a lot of the tools that are behind their success are the same tools that are available to us all…regardless of how small or poor you may be.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you are going to be able to achieve the same impact as a Google, just because you are on LinkedIn and Twitter. But it does mean you can do an awful lot more for your business than you probably have been able to do before…. and you can probably do it as well, or better than your competitors (regardless of their size).

That’s the thing with social media… it can be a great leveller.

Traditionally, those that had the bigger recruitment budget and resources behind them had the upper hand. If you had someone in your business that would put together a nice looking advert for you and make sure it appeared in the weekend’s press alongside ten other of your colleagues adverts you had a distinct advantage over the one man band operator who simply could not achieve the same impact. I have worked in agencies where the extent of their marketing was to have you hand out stupid fliers to shoppers in the hope they might be interested in a job…. whilst my mate was entertaining clients in the hospitality boxes at Man Utd (these days that might be a disadvantage!).

But then the recruitment Gods above got together and made the playing field a bit more even for us all. They gave us social media…. and suddenly we all had access to these awesome tools that were cheap or free, and made us all into DIY marketers and Don Drapers. It didn’t matter who you worked for and how deep or shallow their pockets were…the playing field was level. And we all lived happily ever after….

Yeh right !

Social media can be a great leveller. A boutique with a clear strategy that they follow through on can definitely have a bigger impact than a larger agency doing it badly. The same goes on an individual basis. A recruiter who is really using social media well can do better operating solo from their kitchen table, than a recruiter with a big brand behind them whose extent of using social media is to have a LinkedIn profile and post dodgy drunk selfies on Facebook.

As someone who works in a small business that sometimes has not had a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, social media has been not just a leveller but also a game changer. I may be biased, and having just launched a new business that trains and consults to agencies around this sort of stuff, you would probably be right. But it is because I have seen it work… and if you can get it to work for you, then you don’t need to worry about how big your marketing budget is or what the competition is doing… especially if they are not doing it as well as you (and they are probably not).

An example of an agency putting some effort into their social media strategy is Kingfisher recruitment who are this weeks Agency in Focus…check out their story here….